Arguably, Paint Shop Pro is the closest competition to Adobe Photoshop,
offering a great deal for its very reasonable price.
It is possibly too daunting for absolute beginners, but anyone with a passing
acquaintance with image editors should pick it up fairly quickly.
You can move, dock and customise every palette and even save workspace
arrangements for different tasks.
Paint Shop Pro has always had an extensive toolkit and this release is no
exception, offering the obvious crop, scratch remover and red-eye correction
tools alongside more impressive ones such as Photo Fix, which automatically
optimises an image's colour balance, contrast, clarity, saturation and
sharpness.
New features inlcude Smart Photo Fix which allows you to correct a number of
settings simultaneously, including brightness, colour saturation and focus.
There are also some clever 'makeover' tools that allow you to improve
portrait photography. The Blemish Fixer can remove skin imperfections such as
wrinkles and moles, and there's a 'toothbrush' tool that can even whiten teeth.
These tools work well, but our favourite improvement is the redesigned
Learning Centre. This is a panel that provides help with all the program's main
tools.
However, rather than just providing simple hints and tips, the Learning
Centre will actually select tools for you and display them on screen to get you
started. This is a major step in the ease-of-use direction, which Corel will
hope attracts a new audience.
Optimising an image for the internet is also catered for, and animated GIFs
can be quickly created with the bundled Animation Shop.
Paint Shop Pro's file support is huge, covering not only file formats you
have heard of, but also many you won't.